skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: TaskUp.com: Tasks by Email & Text Message, and more
Check out TaskUp at https://taskup.com

Since our very early alpha release less than two months ago, we've been working non-stop on making TaskUp an awesome product. Today, a few thousand users later and many lessons learned (from a lot of Hacker News comments, we might add!), we are adding a few new features that our users told us they want:
1. Tasks by Email
TaskUp now allows you to turn your emails into tasks for yourself and your co-workers & friends!

You can now add up to 5 additional email addresses through which you can receive tasks in your account. That's more than plenty for all your personal and work email accounts!

- To create a task for yourself:
Reply or Forward the email to/cc/bcc 'track@taskup.com'

- To Create a task for someone else:
Reply or Forward the email to the person e.g. name@domain.com and cc/bcc: track@taskup.com

Note: The subject of the email becomes the 'Task Name' and the email content appears in the 'Notes'

As we continue to develop our mobile apps, we wanted to give our users an alternate way to get their tasks in on the go.

Enter task by Text Message!

To get set up, sign in, click on the Settings icon in the bottom left corner of TaskUp, and enter your cell phone number in the "Incoming Tasks" tab.

Once set up, text (617) 300-0437 with your tasks and they will be automatically created in your inbox!

Also, we have a lot of enhancements, such as cross-browser instant sync, notifications when tasks are incoming, a calendar view, a kanban view, YouTube tutorial videos, and many more.

Also, we blog at http://blog.taskup.com

Stay tuned next week for a rewards system that will rock your GTD socks off!

We would love to get some feedback and comments on our beta release!
I think in this case, it isn't about being dependent on Visual Studio, but C#.
While not released yet, the concept of walled garden and app-stores holds a very existent entrenched position in the commercial mind. I too believe MS need open standards and a thriving crossplatform ecosystem, but I hear more "lets emulate Apple" than I hear "lets emulate linux".

I am cynical. I believe MS want to copy what ever method is currently earning any other software company most money in the shortest term. App-stores keep being portrayed as the one great place where money is earned on software. Like many, I am also tired beyond reason of the word "app". I still see ads in the street that talk about "get our app!" as it would be completely different to say "Buy our software". Sooner or later, that bubble will burst, but until it does, I will doubt the motives of any move that cut of competitor in favor of an app-store which one single entity control.
Ask HN: In which class do you learn about threading
I minored in CS but never learned about this topic. It seems important and I want to educate myself. Can someone tell me which class or classes cover this material?
Looks nice, I was looking into this courses so this might help.

Just one suggestion, I know you might want to expand using social media, but those buttons up there really annoy me. Can you put them at the bottom of the page or somewhere else?
If you read the readme and the source. You would find that much of it was from Tim O Donnell's Google buttons. As my process 3 months ago I gave them a new CSS base, repainted and attached thin bevels. As for the colors I matched the colors and gradients from Microsoft's websites. I barely touched bootstrap for the buttons except for the dropdown, the radio button javascript are hand-made. The form elements and icons however are a different story, they came from Bootstrap and Syncfusion.

All sources are transparently mentioned in the acknowledgements section of the readme.
Very good points. I remember playing Need for Speed 2 SE on a Pentium II 200MHz with an mp3 playing in the background with no problems at all. These days we can emulate several of those machines inside a single OS, while browsing the web and watching a movie at the same time.
Chrome efforts are without doubts to tackle the security concerns of flash, and in that I wish them all the best.
The latest studies show that kids, at least unconsciously, are Bayesians
Ask HN: Simple ideas for weekend hack?
I would love to build something this weekend. Something simple, built upon API's of other application or simple hack. Ex: http://snapsite.me/demo.php, http://www.ngotha.com/
I would love to hear ideas from you. Definitely it should be helpful to other followers of HN.
It probably has to do with the desire to keep gameplay very consistent across all users' hardware. They don't want to give a huge advantage to the enthusiast with a dozen cores over the person playing on their laptop.

But making the graphics better is something that doesn't seem to help your score much. More realistic fog may even make the game a little harder. So it's probably no coincidence that GPUs are leading the way in parallelism.
I see mention of Bootstrap but not Foundation.. am I missing something?
As much as I personally enjoy the demo the creator chose for the main page, I wonder whether said creator could have found a "flo-mo" view of something captivating for reasons other than "this chick is hot". (There's a really unpleasant history of the male gaze being squeezed into tech demos -- I don't think we need to do that anymore.)
Mobile surveys vital for genuine point-of-experience customer feedback
After using my Nexus 7 for a while I'm seriously thinking about switching away from the iPhone for my next phone. This doesn't look that different from the current Nexus phone, but if the rumors of built in wireless charging are true I think it'll be enough.
Ah yes, The Mythical Woman-Month.

I stand corrected. :-)
> Google has removed Flash from Android. [1]

Nope, Adobe did. Even your link says so.
All passive income comes from something with value, and hence carries inherent risk. I'd argue real estate is even riskier, yet you aren't criticizing people in this thread who make money from renting/airbnb.
Actually this FB branch was announced in January. It's not news.
Little details like this drive me crazy as well. However, I'm always afraid of voicing complaints like this for fear of looking like a crazy person. Thanks for validating me. :-)
Google settled with the publishers [1]. There's still a case between Google and the Authors Guild.

[1]:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/google-se...
Yes, and we're slowly loosing all the advantages of having dedicated browsers in the process.
Once the pipeline is warmed up...
Yahoo allows spammers to send email from 2038
I have registered, but not sure what the agenda is.
The point is that even the most parallel programs tend to have bottlenecks where only one thread can proceed. As you add more cores, these bottlenecks increase in relative importance to the parallel parts, which are easily dealt with by your additional parallel capacity.
Congrats on the project! It's really interesting to see electrical engineering tools using web and modern concepts instead of the usual the nasty-windows-only-IDE packaging.
I like to build guitar effects and this is awesome.
Why do you call it a post mortem? Foobub's not dead right?

I really like it by the way, have set it as my default search engine for now.
Nice constructive feedback from an anonymous account.

How about telling the guys what you'd like to see to improve the service ?
> Meanwhile in his own company's coding style for Common Lisp states very similar best practices regarding macros -- they should be used "sparingly and carefully", "You must never use a macro where a function will do.", etc.

This is not arguing against macros, per se. The most powerful feature of macros is controlling how / when arguments are evaluated. So, if you don't use a macro when a function (i.e. standard arg evaluation) will do, you're not missing out on the power of macros.
Yeah, I had a tough time making those look pretty. Removed for now.
Not really. Most of them understand that in order for them to get their deposits they need to provide their bank account info.
Right. But when people talk about simulating the observable universe, they're often getting at that story where people simulate from the beginning of the universe up until now, and I was pointing out that that scenario would take much much longer, because at current speeds it would be constantly losing ground.
I thought that Common Lisp guaranteed Tail Call Optimization (TCO), but it looks like it's actually up to the implementation: http://0branch.com/notes/tco-cl.html
I agreed with what you said up until the last paragraph. Providing a system in which individuals and families more directly choose their health care spending from providers is not a solution to health care access problems. There must be some kind of program available nationwide that serves those that would never be able to purchase health care on their own, due to poverty, homelessness, and disability (among other things). However, this is the fundamental issue for health care at the moment: many government officials simply do not believe that those people should be served at all and that no program should be created or expanded to do so. In fact, those politicians actually want to go the other way with it and reduce the effectiveness of Medicare and Medicaid. This is the real political environment in which the PPACA was introduced and passed.

We can argue whether other approaches would have worked for new health care legislation, but the whole point of any reforms is that it can actually be achieved. Universal health care systems and privatization schemes do not have enough support politically to be feasible, which has a lot to do with other political and social issues in the US.
I'm quite confused. From their legal page:

To use SportsChimp, you must be at least 18 years old and a resident of the United States. By using SportsChimp, you represent and warrant that you are least 18 years old and a resident of the United States.

Isn't this weird? Not only are they saying it's illegal to use this from outside the US, it is inside the US where they'll have the most trouble making this work. These terms were probably lifted from some app/service where they made sense.
I gotcha. It's a good start then. I'll definitely keep an eye on it. A couple suggestions: have an option to turn on a grid in the background. Also would be nice to be able to rotate components.
Influence of Organizational Structure On Software Quality
Seattle Police Department orders two more drones for $150k
I second tomasien on that.
How is this news ? We know this since last May ( http://www.withinwindows.com/2012/05/23/windows-8-secrets-in... ).
He could quote a better example, but I think the document goes deeper than just formatting style.

From the article's excerpt "Principles":

* Don't be "clever" — do the simplest thing that could possibly work properly.
* Be precise.
* Be concise.
* KISS — Keep It Simple, Stupid.
* Use the smallest hammer for the job.

---

They are indeed asking for uniformity against creativity. Which is not a bad thing for corporations (IBM have very strong guidelines for years) but definitely takes away that "hacker" aura that we gave to Google a few years ago.

Any googler that can put this in context?
I would love to ditch Eagle PCB for a tool like this. Eagle is awesome, but as a hobbyist I don't use 70% of its features. From a quick look at circuits.io here's what I would want in order to make the switch:

1) Let me import my Eagle components
2) Give me more control over grid sizing
3) Autorouter!

I'm also interested in seeing the fabrication prices. Right now I use batchpcb.com (a Sparkfun service). There really aren't any other good options for printing a single PCB.
While there was a "reductio ad absurdam" in there, it appears that term was used in error. From the rest of the post, the complaint appears to have been about an alleged "straw man argument".

I have no comment on the issue, I just wanted to point out a terminology confusion.
When I saw Ashton Kutcher in the demo image it made me think that this was his latest venture - but I can't find any mention of him investing in this on Google. Thus I feel I cant trust the company behind this. No trust = no signup.
What sound do chimps make? Kerching. Simple.
Einstein's math suggests faster-than-light travel
Yesterday I found that twitter wasn't working for my simplified posting interface and example node.js application https://justtweet.herokuapp.com/ so I set out to fix it. The first thing I did was add logging of the error. When I tried pushing it back to Heroku I found that something else broke, because I didn't specify versions for my dependencies in my package.json and it got newer versions with a slightly different API. When I got it working I had refactored my code and changed the API url to https and to specify the version number as 1.1. Thanks to Dave's work note I found out why:

> "All non-versioned API endpoints, such as http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline, will cease functioning."

http://worknotes.scripting.com/october2012/101112ByDw/unbrea...

Mine was api.twitter.com without a version, not twitter.com.

https://github.com/resources/justtweet.herokuapp.com/commit/...

I see why they felt the need to break twitter.com to simplify their deployment but I don't see why they thought it made sense to break api.twitter.com urls without a version number.
Fair enough, though when did it actually go live?
Looks awesome!

I have a quick question about PCB layout. In the video, when you switch from the schematic to the PCB layout view, there are thin lines which are clicked to become red. There is a final line that is clicked to become blue. Can you explain what is going on there?

FYI: I'm a CS person who is learning about electronics and circuits. I started building radio and op-amp circuits, and have read that prototyping on breadboard doesn't work well. I tried going from schematic to directly soldering on a perf board and it ended in disaster. This tool seems exactly what I need ... though I could use it to figure out my perf board layout.
I've often thought that stylistic (as opposed to semantic) formatting rules should be enforced by pre/post commit scripts or nanny scripts.

This would be a huge pain with hard-to-parse languages like C++, but might work a lot better for C / ObjC / CL / Java.

Just put your braces wherever they make you feel special, and let the formatter sort it out.

Anyone do this?
By way of being pedantic -- reductio ad absurdum is not a fallacy. Showing extreme consequences by taking assumptions to their conclusions is perfectly valid. That's the whole point of reductio.
It's an article about a socialist democrat from a liberal leaning publication and how a smear campaign of EPIC proportions was created to thwart his chances. Weird Right!? </puns> How did Fox news miss this one too?! </sarcasm>
Much needed, thanks for making it.
Sorry, if I realized you were replying, I wouldn't have deleted :p

While videogames have been one of the main economic forces pushing processor technology, I've heard that few games can actually use more than 1 CPU core. Is this because of a difference in the way games are programmed? Is it because single-core programming is (I've heard) so much easier, and games are more often written by aspiring novices than professional drones?
Five Steps to Password Security - Developer Best Practices
Of course you wouldn't say THE founder, you'd say A founder
Interesting name choice. I was expecting, uh, a deployment daemon. I understand that you want to use the word "deploy", but I was thinking more of a continuous deployment kit?
19,000 against and 0 support UK govt 'Snooper's Charter' following consultation
Skyscraper built in the Firefox inspector's 3D View
Astronomers discover diamond planet
Having organized several parties involving mostly programmers before, i can say that yes, doing it on weekday makes event way more fun, because it puts a strong positive filter on those attending.
Why Ruby code conventions matter
The Billion Dollar Shack (2000)
“The surface of this planet is likely covered in graphite and diamond rather than water and granite,” said Nikku Madhusudhan, the Yale researcher
I didn't know this existed. excellent!
My favorite modern banking feature is instant SMS notifications about credit card charges. It's cool to immediately see the confirmation on a phone after you type PIN into a terminal. It's even better for online purchases, when you often don't know whether the payment went through or not (and why).
About 8-10 years ago, another Turkish bank, Garanti, offered sms based money sending when the sms craze was at its height.

It would send you a one-time random code that you could enter at any ATM, along with your and the sender's phone numbers and the known amount (which would not be in the SMS you got as the receiver).

The sender would have to sms a service number like "3434" with the receiver phone number, the amount, and a special pre-determined pin. Whenever the amount was sent and accepted, the sender got confirmation SMSes, so they could notice and contest this in the off chance of fraud. Also, there was a daily limit to the amount that could be sent this way, only increasable online or over the phone after identity checks.

All in all, not bad. Could be abused under very lucky circumstances (eg. phone got stolen and was storing sent SMSes, which was not the default during those days when phone memory was limited. And then the thief would have to get another stolen phone to retrieve the money so as to not give out their identity, and would have to do so under a security camera'd ATM), but not a super high chance and no super high risk.

This saved me tons of times when I would have been stranded as a teenager but managed to call my parents. Or, later on, when I had my phone but had misplaced my card.
I would like to know some of the details of the algorithmic tricks that were employed to solve this problem. As I was reading, I was thinking of a tree structure encoding the dictionary with each letter (of a valid word) being a node. If the next letter isn't found, or if you reach a leaf with letters left in the candidate word, then you've misspelled something.

Does anyone have an idea of how much compression could be achieved through such a structure?
tl;dr Use the right tool for the job. You need to know your tool (CPU) and your job (application(s)).

I.e. an app which is heavily affected by Amdahls law doesn't really profit from more cores, where as highly parallel apps do profit a lot (see reference to Niagara architecture at the end).

What I find strange is that the article first introduces the difference between multitasking and multithreading in a rather lengthy manner, and then uses Amdahl's law, which only applies to multithreading. Especially, there is a gap on what is stated first:
> "So multitasking means you are using multiple applications at the same time. Which you always do, these days."
With the conclusion:
> "With multi-core, your mileage may vary, depending on the algorithms used by the application (to what extent are they parallelized, and to what extent do they have to remain sequential?), and on the performance of the individual cores."

His discussion is all well when you have one app that is really needing the power and the other multitasking apps don't need much CPU (e.g. playing mp3 and such). Which is the case for most desktop systems, I'd say.
For servers, it can be really different, and you could either have many processes running or one process is heavily optimized for multithreading and avoids Amdahl's law nicely. Then the discussion is kinda void.
That's one confusing part - videogames are supposed to be very difficult to parallelize on CPU but MUST be parallelized on GPU. Is this because the CPU is usually running more complex code with lots of multiple branches and (multiplayer) coordinating through network layers, while the GPU is basically just transforming arrays of numbers into arrays of other numbers? (Arrays which monitors convert to photons for us to see)
Interesting, but the text is so blurry I can't read it half the time.
Well, sometimes there are design reasons to use something that seems counter-intuitive. I can't say why Microsoft would choose to do this but there are possibly several reasons. You can't always go by what the science says because if we did then all designs would be roughly the same; whatever science says each element should look like. If we followed the suggestions from your linked article then all of our elements, especially buttons, would be circles.

Sometimes, for the sake of the design, you would choose harsh corners so that it makes them stand out all the more. Especially since so many use rounded corners for their designs these days. When everyone else has rounded corners your squared corners stand out. They may be bothersome to the eye but they attract the attention.

Maybe having rounded cornered buttons conflicts with the rest of the design which ruins the pleasing effect of the entire design? Possibly they felt breaking the "rules" for the buttons prevents a collapse of the design as a whole. Say, for instance, the majority of the design is squared corners but those rounded cornered buttons stand out so much that the eye is constantly draw to them instead of the content to be read?

Maybe they just don't like rounded buttons?

As someone else commented, maybe they don't want their buttons to be too similar to buttons from another design? It does seem you can be sued for minor design choices these days.
My warranty directly points you to support.google.com/nexus although in the small print it does mention support.asus.com

But if Google is going to brand a device, design a device, market a device, and sell the device, they should do a better job supporting the device.
i could be wrong, but deprecation != removal (which is what this sounds like)
One of the key benefits of node.js is that people who are great with JS can write server code and you have one language stack less to worry about. You can with that (watch for security issues) also share code & objects between the server and browser.

Can't see how this fits into that.
Looks interesting. Finally, a use for the dreaded un-removable "Newsstand" icon on my iPhone.
s/copyright/trademark/

And it's possible this is not infringement. But it could still land them with C&D letters or answering a court filing.

The legality of gambling is dependent where their users are located. If it's illegal to gamble in Virginia, then users of the site in Virginia get into trouble for gambling or Virginia tries to get the site closed down (or maybe blocked by ISPs in VA.) But since they're using fake currency and not paying out in real USD, they'll probably be just fine.
Large memory sizes did a similar thing to visibility determination in computer graphics. Determining which parts of multiple 3D intersecting shapes are visible used to be tricky and dependent on the shapes - triangle vs triangle was different than triangle vs sphere, tube vs sphere and so on. Now you can just use z-buffering which determines the visibility on a per-pixel basis, not to mention that all of this is implemented for you in hardware.
Scoot Networks - A New Way To Get Around SF
Too bad it is iOS6 only, leaving my iPad 1 out in the cold.